Whiteout
by EvenAtMyDarkest
Summary: Shawn wakes up in the snow with no memory of how he got there. And since when does it snow in Santa Barbara, anyway?


**AN** : _Yes yes, I know, I should be updating Ronaldo, but this is just a one shot, and said update will be coming in the next few days, don't worry._

 _This is set near the beginning of season 6. I don't own Psych or any of its characters or concepts._

* * *

Now, he usually likes to take his sweet time waking up, but one of the prerequisites for that speed setting being preferable is his being comfortable. Not freezing his ass off and covered in something wet.

Turns out, as he realizes after a couple seconds of trying to pry his eyes open, that the ass-freezing and the wetness are linked. Snow. Huh.

His eyes finally snap open, and he sits bolt upright. He is in the underbrush of a dark forest, snow falling heavy and thick, though not much of it makes it all the way through the bare branches of the trees to the ground. The moon is nearly full, providing needed illumination, and the stars are out. It's the dead of night. He blinks down at himself. He's wearing nothing but his pajamas—the really soft ones he just bought last month—his blue bathrobe, and his only pair of winter boots. His hands are like icicles and he can barely feel his ears. He himself is covered in a layer of snow almost an inch thick, and he quickly begins shaking and wiping it off, wondering how long he's been lying here. In the snow.

No, he… he definitely lives in Santa Barbara.

Snow?

Where the hell is he?

He pulls himself to his feet, rubbing his arms vigorously, his breath coming out in extraordinarily large and visible puffs. His teeth chatter of their own accord as he casts his mind back, desperately trying to conjure up the last thing that happened to him.

The last memory he can seem to pull out of the vaults of his oh so impressive mind is of watching old episodes of Double Trouble while nursing a minor hangover the morning after Christmas. Okay, so it's winter… yeah, this weather makes sense, except that he definitely, _definitely_ lives in Santa Barbara.

So, what? Somebody brought him further east and dumped him out here to die? Either that or he _is_ in Santa Barbara and it's Ice Age: The Sequel. Wait, that's actually a thing. And none of those sequels were even any good. Well, sort of. He can see their value in a guilty pleasure sort of way.

The horrible cold in his ears in particular suddenly begins screaming for attention and he takes a break from trying to warm his arms to cover them up. He is not nearly covered enough. But still, you'd think if somebody really did leave him for dead, they would have taken his robe, at least his boots.

He tears the robe's sash out of its loops and wraps it around his head, tying it in the back, effectively covering his ears. However, he comes across an unexpected obstacle in doing this: a large bump on the side of his head. Possibly more than a bump?

He grimaces, and after taking his fingers away tries to examine them for traces of red, but it's difficult through the snow and the dark and the sudden pounding pain in his head that has risen to prominence with his awareness of the bump.

He realizes he can feel snow touching the bare skin directly above his boots, and quickly surges to his feet to start trying to get his lower body a little warmer. Unfortunately, immediately he falls flat on his face, clutching his head, groaning in pain, because the sudden altitude brought on a dizziness that just about confirms his suspicion that he's more than a little concussed. And now his front half is covered, once again, in snow. Fantastic.

Much as he wants to try again without a pause, he gives himself a minute to cope with the splitting pain in his head, gives the world a minute to stop spinning around him.

Well, if the world really did stop spinning, that would _actually_ be the apocalypse. He knows Gus would correct him along those lines if he were here. Wherever the hell "here" is.

Shawn climbs again to his feet, slowly this time, and he braces himself against a tree for support, but the vertigo isn't nearly as bad as it was on the first try. Okay, baby steps. Except he doesn't know how long he's been here and he can barely feel his fingers and maybe there isn't time for baby steps. He needs to get out of the cold.

He gathers himself up, and shouts "H-Hey!" with all the strength he can muster. "Is anyone there?"

His voice echoes eerily around him, adding to his general feeling of isolation and making him feel even more uneasy than before. He waits, but receives no reply.

After a minute or so more of trying yields no response, he glances around, trying to figure out which way he should go, and for the first time his eyes fall on what was behind him when he woke up.

Before him, stretching upwards until it passes out of his sight—not that visibility is exactly top notch right now—is a cliff face. All the little ridges and crevices are much more easily visible than they normally would be because of the snow piled on them.

Could he have fallen down this thing? Would he have even survived?

He surveys it. Eh, he could've. Probably would've gotten pretty bruised along the way, but he could've. Fall injuries are weird. His dad devoted a full week to teaching him that one after some guy tried killing himself by jumping off two roofs and failed each time. Not exactly one of the fonder memories of his childhood, but the information was useful.

He lets out a large breath. He might have further injuries he just can't feel through the numbness present in his various appendages. Heck, it took him a while just to figure out that he had a goose egg on his head.

Whatever. Not important. He has no idea where he is or whether it's plausible to think anyone might be looking for him, but it's not like he can just stay put and wait for help to arrive. He wouldn't do that even under normal circumstances. The cliff seems like his best bet. It's obviously completely impossible to climb it, so he's just gotta walk along it and hope that he finds a place to ascend.

He starts moving his feet, and with the first step he takes, a bit of snow falls into his boot. At least he's wearing socks. He's pretty sure. Yeah, he must be—he's otherwise dressed for bed, and he's not one of those maniacs who sleeps barefoot.

He wraps his arms around himself, mindfully closing his robe tight in the absence of the sash belt, and starts his trek along the rock wall that stretches endlessly into the snow. And man, does it suck. He is dangerously cold and every couple of minutes there's this single _boom_ in the back of his head reminding him of the injury he can't even remember sustaining. There's this black hole obliterating his most recent memories and he doesn't know how far that hole goes.

After a while it finally occurs to him to check his pockets, hoping for his phone. But no dice. They're empty.

Everything will be fine, he tells himself. He's woken up without having any idea what brought him to his current location before. Except that then, three other people were in the same boat, and the place where he woke up was safe and familiar, and he knew roughly how much time he had lost.

Practically the same situation, really.

He's breathing into his hands and rubbing them together profusely, trying to generate some heat and keep his body temperature up, but he knows it's not enough. The cliff face beside him doesn't seem to change; he still doesn't know how high it is, and there don't seem to be any ideal places to try climbing. And all the while, the snow keeps coming down.

For a moment the thought crosses his mind that it might be a good idea to try building a fire. All the wood around here is wet, but he could try anyway.

Except… this isn't Man Versus Wild. He can't just be in the middle of nowhere. He had to come from _somewhere_. If somebody really did dump him here, they wouldn't have trekked out very far from a road. In fact, it's really very likely that they dropped him over this cliff. He has to get to the top. It's the middle of the night and he doubts there's a busy road nearby, but he has better chances trying to flag somebody down than he has doing… pretty much anything else he can think of.

He is not going to die out here. Freezing to death is such a lame way to go.

Something's wrong with this. Something doesn't sit right with him. Last he remembers, he was in a city where the weather was very mild at worst, so why is he wearing winter boots, let alone _his own_ winter boots? It's like he put them on himself. Like he knew he would be facing conditions like this. But then why isn't he dressed head to toe in the proper attire?

His teeth are still chattering. Putting one foot in front of the other is getting harder and harder as he becomes less and less aware of what his body is doing. At least it seems to reliably be on autopilot at this point. Except that his hands won't quite obey him anymore when he tries to use them to get warm.

He's been vaguely aware of the rock wall gradually curving away from him, but all of a sudden it takes a sharp turn, and he stands there blinking for a moment, his eyes getting used to focus on something further away—because it hasn't only turned severely away from him, it's disappeared. He looks to his right, realizing that it has been becoming gradually shorter and shorter for some time.

There's a road in front of him. A _road_. He doesn't think he's ever been more thankful to see pavement before. Well, technically he still doesn't see the pavement, but with the sudden perfect evenness of the snow blanket, it couldn't be anything else.

The road is almost perfectly parallel to the cliff, and though he balks at the idea of a climb, this is just what he's been looking for: a way to get to the top of the cliff he might have fallen down. He can do it. At least that's what he has to tell himself.

Upon exiting the treeline, he realizes he was a little off with the whole "perfect evenness" thing—there's definitely at least one pair of tire tracks here. Fast being covered by the heavy snowfall, but somebody drove by here very recently. Promising, considering the apparent hour. Unfortunately, also upon exiting the treeline, he enters the realm of influence of the wind—and it on its own wouldn't be so bad, but it's not on its own. It's teamed up with the still-falling snow and blowing cold air into his face.

Keeping his head down, he doubles back, hooking around the end of the cliff, and starts his ascent.

The cliff portion of his journey more than doubles the total length; his progress has been getting gradually slower and slower, and going uphill just exacerbates the issue. What he wouldn't give for warmth and light right now.

He suddenly realizes he's been standing still for a full minute. He feels frozen completely solid. He swears there are tiny icicles hanging from his eyelashes. He tries opening his mouth, spends several seconds preparing himself, and stutters out with a mighty shudder, "He-help-p…"

Pitiful. He's gonna have to do a lot better than that. He grunts several times, warming up his voice box, and turns the last grunt into an " _Is anybody there?_ " that's very close to a respectable shout.

He keeps at it, calling out things like "Please help me" and the classic "Hey," and as he does he finally convinces himself to start moving again. At this point the cold has just about reached his heart, he thinks. Soon enough there won't be a corner of his body that's safe from it, and that's when he'll shut down. He is running out of time.

Just as this thought enters his head, he just about _feels_ a light coming from somewhere ahead of him. He looks up, squinting against the wind and the snow, and almost sees something in the distance… like a candle in the window on a cold dark winter's night.

Everything around him goes dark to the tune of "Can't Fight This Feeling." He probably hits the snowy ground at some point in the space between awake and asleep.

* * *

He awakens slowly to tingles all over his skin that he used to simply call "warmth" before he realized how much he took it for granted. And now that he has done that… he will keep calling it "warmth," because it's easy. But hell is he going to appreciate it more.

Gradually he becomes aware of other (less important) sensory input—the faint sound of beeping, the whiteness of the walls, the dull ache in the side of his head, the too-clean smell. The sky outside, as he can see through the window to his left, is grey—not black. It's morning, properly morning. And just in case, given all this, he still wasn't sure where he was, he glances down and sees the immaculate hospital sheets—several more than he's ever seen before—and the IV stuck into his arm. Bandages wrapped around his head lend him an itchy forehead. His wet clothes have been replaced with a hospital gown and a pair of fuzzy blue socks.

Underneath the window, Juliet sits in one of the visitor's chairs, reading a magazine. But even the small movement of turning his head towards her seems to be enough to draw her attention, because her eyes snap up towards him and she quickly stands up, placing the magazine on the chair behind her and stepping towards him. "Shawn?"

"Jules," he says, voice quiet from nothing but lack of energy. "You're here."

"Of course I am. How do you feel?"

"Um… warm. In both that 'face flushing high school boy with a crush' way, and that 'I think I just nearly froze to death' way."

She smiles with unrestrained relief. "I woke up and you were gone… The snow was falling too fast for there to be any tracks to follow. I was out with the police looking for you for three hours before I got a call from the manager saying you passed out a few yards from his front door."

He sits silently for a time, putting together all these new puzzle pieces.

In the lull, she chuckles, but she sounds exhausted. "Some vacation, huh?"

"Vacation?" he asks immediately.

"Yeah," she says, tone and expression way too neutral.

The gears in his mind start turning furiously. "Honey, we've been talking about a vacation for weeks, just throwing ideas around, but Christmas came and went and I was kind of at the point where I thought nothing would actually happen—"

She lets out a quick but deep exhale. "Oh, thank goodness, you remember Christmas."

The immediate acceptance of his apparent lack of memories leads him to believe that with her description of events up till now, she's been testing him, seeing whether he'd react with confusion. But yes, he does freshly recall Christmas. "Of course I do. I could never forget the initiation of a proper streak with the third year in a row I guessed what my dad had gotten me when he had no idea what I'd gotten him."

"Well, Shawn, we ended up making the vacation happen. We finally sat down and planned it two days before we left, which was yesterday."

His brow furrows. "So where are we?"

"Aspen, Colorado."

"Huh. That's fun."

She smiles. "It was your idea. We were just going to be here for three days. Nice and affordable, despite how last-minute it all was."

It is at this moment that Gus comes bursting in. He's a mess, a large backpack slung over his shoulder, shirt rumpled beyond belief, eyes wide with worry. Juliet stands up.

"Whoa, Jules," says Shawn, "you didn't tell me we brought Gus. Unless… Buddy, you didn't finally take a page out of my book and follow us here on your own, did you? I'm so proud of—"

"I got on the first flight I could after I heard, Shawn," Gus interjects, already sounding annoyed, though his face still broadcasts concern. His face has always shown exactly what he's feeling, even if his tone doesn't quite match. "Are you okay?"

Shawn then notices the slight depressions on the sides of his head indicating the recent use of a sleep mask, though the shadows under his eyes strongly imply that it was not successful. "Gus, you didn't have to do that. I'm fit as a viola."

"Fiddle."

"I've heard it both ways."

"You did that one on purpose just so you could say that."

He places his hand on his heart. "Gus, I'm hurt."

Gus's shoulders are quickly relaxing. "When I got on the airplane I didn't even know if you were still alive."

"You got my texts, didn't you?" Juliet asks.

Gus nods. "Yeah, after we landed. So, catch me up?"

She places her hand on the back of her chair. "Seems he fell about thirty feet. Sustained some cuts and bruises, but the snow cushioned his landing. He was lying out there for somewhere between one and three hours before he woke up. Been diagnosed with moderate hypothermia, which is, of course, extremely lucky. Considering the snow, the temperature really could have been lower. All in all he was out there for about five hours with nothing but a bathrobe."

"Hey now, I wasn't buck naked under the thing," Shawn interjects. "My current PJs are the softest, warmest PJs I've ever owned. Plus, I had boots."

Jules nods agreeably. "And thank God for that."

"Why were you out there, Shawn?" Gus asks, his worry having melted away enough that a touch of exasperation creeps into his voice.

Shawn tosses one hand up vaguely in an gesture of helplessness. "Dude, I cannot remember."

"And there's the other part of the diagnosis," Jules finishes. "Moderate concussion too. Seems so far that the only symptoms are dizziness and some memory loss."

Gus looks alarmed. "How much memory loss?"

Shawn squints. "Who are you, again?"

"Not funny, Shawn," Gus snaps.

He grins. "Just the last couple days. I remember Christmas. I take it that was recent."

Gus nods, though he still looks concerned. "It's the 29th."

"Wait a second. So what's happening here is… I have Christmas amnesia? Dude, it's like _The Long Kiss Goodnight!_ Or _Santa Who?_ which may be better."

"But if it's _The Long Kiss Goodnight_ that makes me Samuel L. Jackson," Gus protests.

"Take one for the team, buddy, I can't be a chick, that would be too weird." He rubs his hands together in an attempt to generate some extra warmth. "Okay. Think all this is sorted out. Next step: I don't know about you, but I'd still like to know what I was doing outside in the middle of the night."

"So would we, Shawn," Juliet agrees, her patience apparently starting to wear thin.

He doesn't know what it is—the lack of other life-threatening stimuli allowing his mind to work closer to full capacity probably has something to do with it—but suddenly he feels like he almost knows something, like when you're going about your business an hour after you woke up and the memory of remembering what you dreamed last night flashes through your head so fast it doesn't do a thing but frustrate you. Automatically he raises his hand to his head, pressing his middle finger lightly against his temple.

"Are you getting something?" comes Juliet's voice.

"My visions are all jumbled and shadowy," he murmurs. "Can't think why."

"The head trauma could be a factor," Gus offers dryly.

"You might be onto something there, buddy. But I think I am sensing… something…" He screws his eyes shut even tighter.

He _is_ getting something.

That "boom" that wouldn't stop going off in his head—it's been fading into greater clarity ever since it started, and finally he thinks it's crossed the line into more than a symptom of a headache. It's a memory.

Gunfire.

"I'm seeing," he blurts before giving himself time to think it through any further, "a… weapon. A firearm. More specifically… a rifle. Probably a hunting rifle. It's being shot… yes, it's being shot not once, but twice."

He got up after the first one woke him up, not sure he'd heard it correctly, and not wanting to wake Juliet. He didn't intend to be outside for more than a couple minutes. He just wanted to watch the snow fall. But then, after about one minute, just as he was turning to head back to their cabin, there was another sound of the same type. In his tired and reckless attempt to discern any details about what was happening, he turned back, advanced a few steps, and found his foot met with nothing as he plunged downward into the cold and the dark.

"Okay," Juliet says uncertainly. "Our cabin is very near the edge of hunting grounds."

Shawn gets ready to answer with an "Ah, but"… but nothing comes to mind. He opens his eyes slowly.

"You went outside to listen for more gunshots and then fell off a cliff," Gus summarizes.

He blinks, racking his brain for a reason to convince them to take this seriously. But either he can't remember it… or there just isn't one.

He's beginning to suspect it's the latter.

"For the sake of thoroughness, I'll go tell the police," says Juliet. "They're still in the building. But Shawn… sometimes a gunshot is just a gunshot."

"Yeah," he says quietly, agreeably, as she rises to leave.

"Be right back," she reassures at the door, and is gone.

Shawn and Gus are left, sitting and standing, respectively, in silence, for a few moments. Gus finally places his backpack down in the chair that Juliet wasn't occupying and looks at Shawn. "You always have to have a case, don't you?"

"Gus, don't be that soggy Oreo you dropped in your glass of milk. I went on vacation, didn't I?"

"And while on vacation," Gus counters easily, "you went looking for a case where there wasn't one. In the middle of the night, no less."

"What are you trying to say?"

"Shawn, you're on a Christmas weekend getaway with the woman you love more than anything. And you still can't detach yourself from the work." He's silent for a moment, and moves his backpack again, to the floor so that he can take its place in the chair. As he eases himself down, he continues, "I have no doubt that this is the right line of work for you. But there are other things. Maybe even other things that can exist independently from that work."

"I know that," he scoffs. "Don't you think I know that?"

"Not really."

"Ah." He is thoughtful for a moment. "That's probably why you said it."

"That would be why, yes."

"Gus, I can't ignore _anything_ and you know this. It's a problem, but it's not one that's going away anytime soon."

"Make an effort," he says quietly. "Because you and Juliet have been wanting to spend some time together someplace nice for a while now and on the first day you were away, you went off looking for a case and ended up making yourself into one. It's exhausting for me, and it has to be as at least as much for her. She's up to her neck in cases all the time, her own as well as yours. And she's gonna want to take a break from it and just have some, you know, couple's time every once in a while."

"Look at you, Mr. Love Doctor-slash-Sigmund Freud," Shawn comments with a touch of pride. "Why aren't you married yet, you handsome and understanding devil?"

Gus apparently unconsciously adjusts his coat, his lips curling into that proud smile. "I believe it's because I understand women _too_ well. It intimidates them."

That is extremely far from the truth, but Shawn keeps quiet about it, his friend's words echoing in his head. Feeling the need to defend himself, he says quietly, "I wasted my life up till a few years ago not working cases."

Gus shrugs. "Look, man, I get it. You want to make up for lost time. Just try not to create homemade cases yourself."

"You know I didn't do this on purpose, right?" he asks dryly.

"Can I really be sure of that?"

Shawn smiles. A few moments of comfortable silence pass between them. The muffled chorus of hospital noises reaches them through the closed door. Shawn rubs his non-IV-ed arm, still not entirely convinced he's warm yet. He comments at length, "Dude, I'm just glad I didn't die because I slipped and fell off a cliff for no reason. That would have been so disappointing."

Gus's eyebrows knit together. "'Disappointing' is… a word."

"You bet it is. Right along with 'splendiferous,' 'crumpet,' and unfortunately, 'moist.'"

Gus cringes. "You know I don't like that word, Shawn. How has probably the coldest, wettest night of your life not made you shy away from it?"

"You know nothing can keep me down, Gus."

His friend cracks a smile despite himself. "Yeah. I know."

* * *

 **AN** : _I pushed this all out in one evening/night/morning (…I've been awake a while) and then posted it immediately because I am an impulsive fool. I may make some edits, brushing things up a bit. I also had pretty much no plan for where it was going, so, maybe that will help you forgive its directionlessness. Hopefully you enjoyed anyway?_


End file.
